So you left the house yesterday and something like this happened: Your feet slithered about on the pavement, either causing you to skid and fall, painfully, or almost fall, making your stomach lurch. Yet you trudged on, resolutely, feeling like Viggo Mortensen in those posters for The Road except without small child to lean on for balance.

The second decade of the 21st century started in a perilous place for traditional book publishing. Apple launched its Tablet early in 2010, rendering all 2009's e-reader Christmas presents immediately obsolete as users realised that you could download literature on to a wireless device without wanting to bang your head repeatedly against 70 copies of War and Peace. In winter 2010, e-books reigned and so-called Dead Tree Books were burned all over the country in an effort to conserve oil resources. But an unexpected glitch in the technology meant that the Tablet accidentally censored e-copies of Steve Jobs' autobiography, deleting all evidence of the Apple boss's personality from users' blink-proof screens.

When Simone de Beauvoir wrote in The Second Sex that "one is not born, but rather becomes, woman", she was not thinking about the physical transformations which would one day produce a Katie Price. The process Beauvoir had in mind was the way civilisation produced "this intermediary product between the male and the eunuch that is called feminine". But cosmetic surgery is merely a recent addition to that process, reiterating that femaleness on its own is never enough; in the 21st century, some women feel they have to resort to ever more extreme methods to declare themselves truly feminine.

She admits she drank too much at Oxford, had one fling after another in her twenties, and makes no secret of her political ambitions. After acknowledging all that in a newspaper interview, can Sally Bercow expect us to take her seriously? The Conservative MP Nadine Dorries certainly thinks not.

The Brian Viner Interview: After single-handedly turning Sir Alex Ferguson's hair grey, the former Manchester United striker thinks he's ready to run a big club. He speaks about race, women and his drinking adventures with Brian Lara